Bite Club

agreement, and Doug seemed to have caught a little bit too much of a clue.

Doug grudgingly dropped it back to the table. Professor Larkin came around, checked out the sample bottles, and recorded them against a master sheet. As he walked away and she and Doug packed their bags, Claire said, “See? I told you he’d be checking.”

“Yeah,” Doug whispered back. “But he already checked us out.”

And before she could stop him, he grabbed a couple of the vials, stuck them in his bag, and took off.

Claire swallowed the impulse to yell, and a second one, to kick the table in frustration. She didn’t dare tell Larkin; he was Protected, and Doug had no idea what he was getting into. She had to get him to give the vial back. Dumb-ass wouldn’t have any idea what to do with it, anyway.

She hoped.

TWO

Unfortunately, Stinky Doug wasn’t that easy to find. For one thing, she’d never learned his last name. Hacking into Professor Larkin’s class records would be easy enough, but Claire had other classes, one after another, right up through midafternoon. Then she was scheduled for the lab—the real one. And an evening of weird science with the weirdest boss ever.

Myrnin, she hoped, wouldn’t notice if she was a little late. He had a pretty flexible concept of time.

Claire stopped off in the University Center, which had Wi-Fi, and claimed a table in the coffee bar area. Her housemate Eve must have finally dragged herself out of bed, because she was behind the counter, yawning and sipping a massively large cup of what, knowing Eve, must have been pure espresso.

“Hiya, cutie,” Eve said, and leaned on the bar to smile at Claire. “Mornings are hard.”

“It isn’t morning,” Claire said, straight-faced.

Eve made a tragic face. “I stand corrected. Afternoons are hard. Mornings are pure evil from the pits of hell, which is why I don’t do them anymore.” She took a gulp from her cup, shuddered, and said, “Oh, yeah, that’s the stuff. Caffeinate me. So, Beautiful Brainiac, what can I do for you?”

“The usual, I guess.”

“One piping-hot mocha, extra large, coming up!” Eve rang it up and took Claire’s money. As she counted out change, she shook her newly shag-cut black hair back from her pale face and grinned. The grinning didn’t really go with the whole Goth thing, but that was Eve. She didn’t do labels. “Hey, did you get how excited Shane was about that martial arts thingy? He almost ran me over when I came downstairs. I never saw somebody so thrilled to be invited to an ass kicking.”

“He was pretty stoked,” Claire agreed. “How about you? Are you going?”

“Take classes? That I actually pay for? What do you think I am—a college girl or something? Besides, I defend myself just fine.” She did, actually. Eve not only made her own stakes, but she also blinged them out with crystal designs. The wooden ones were sort of like stun guns for vamps; wood couldn’t kill most of them, just immobilize them, unless the vamps were very young, like Michael.

But Eve also made silver ones, and those were deadly. Claire felt a shiver along her spine as she remembered just how deadly they could be. She hadn’t meant to, but she’d destroyed one vampire that way. Nasty. And even though she’d done it in self-defense, she hadn’t felt good about it.

“Hmmm,” Eve was saying now, in a contemplative kind of way. She tapped her lip with one black fingernail and smiled. “There could be a use for that gym after all, now that I think about it. You know, there is one martial art I like.”

“Which is?”

“A surprise, Claire Bear. Yeah, that might definitely be some fun. You might even enjoy it, too.” A cute, tiny frown line slowly appeared between her eyebrows. “You okay? You look kind of spooked.”

“Yeah, coming from someone who looks like an actual ghost.…..”

“Respect the awesome look, girlfriend. Okay, if you don’t want to talk, don’t. One mocha, coming up! Sit down; I’ll bring it over. It’s slow, anyway.”

It wasn’t just slow; this hour of the day, it was deserted. Claire left Eve to the espresso construction (something Eve was amazingly good at, actually) and flipped open her laptop. It took her exactly seven minutes to hack into Larkin’s class roster and discover that Stinky Doug’s full name was Doug Legrande. Larkin, creepily enough, even had all their addresses, phone numbers, and e-mails, although Claire was pretty sure she’d never provided him with any of that intel. Either the university was really free with their personal details, or Larkin had connections.

Duh, she already knew that. He had a bracelet from Oliver. Connections didn’t quite cover it.

“You gonna drink that?”

Claire looked up. Eve was sitting across from her, slumped in the rickety plastic chair, sipping her massive cup of whatever—it was Eve’s own cup, with a cartoony got blood? on the side. On campus, it was funny. Off campus…not so much.

As Claire stared blankly at her, Eve nodded to the mocha that had magically appeared next to her laptop. “The whipped cream is getting all melty,” Eve said. “Whipped cream is a terrible thing to waste. Oh, except it’s not real whipped cream—it’s that canned stuff, which is kind of nasty, so there’s that. Maybe a good choice after all, letting it melt. Whatcha doing?”

That was Eve, through and through, even when she was sleepy. Keeping up with her required a healthy gulp of the mocha and a very active brain. “I’m trying to find Stinky Doug,” Claire said. “He lives on campus, in Lansdale House, I guess.”

“Stinky Doug? Oh, God. Please tell me you’re going to do everyone a public service and deliver him some shower gel. The last time he came in here, I thought I was going to have to call those biohazard guys. Although if this is some weird and inconceivable college-crush thing, I don’t want to know. Let me have my fragile illusions.”

Claire rolled her eyes. “Trust me, I wouldn’t kiss Doug even after the shower gel and decontamination. No, he did something stupid, and I need to convince him not to make it worse—that’s all.” She explained about the experiment, the blood, and Doug’s boneheaded move. Eve kept steadily drinking her coffee, eyes half closed.

“You considered snitching on him?” she asked. “Because, honestly, wouldn’t be the worst idea ever. Just make sure Larkin knows you didn’t take it. Let him draw his own conclusions.”

“That’s the same thing as throwing Doug under the bus,” Claire said. “Look, he’s just dumb, that’s all. And he doesn’t know about”—Claire waved vaguely around, indicating Morganville—“all this.” Well, she wasn’t one hundred percent sure of that, actually, but he shouldn’t know. That counted.

“If he had any kind of a clue, he wouldn’t be caught dead with that stuff. See what I did there? Caught dead? I crack myself up.” Eve sipped more coffee she probably, at this point, didn’t need. “So you’re visiting Stinky Doug and warning him off, without explaining why. Is that your whole plan?”

“Kinda.”

“Awesome. Let me know how it goes, Plan Girl.”

“You have any better ideas?”

Eve took another delicate swallow of coffee. “Well,” she said, “Stinky Doug has a lot of classes. If you’ve got his dorm room address, how difficult would it be to toss the place, find the stuff, and get rid of it? Nobody has to know.”

“Great. And do you actually know a ninja?”

“Yep,” Eve said, and gave her a sleepy, luminous smile. “He’s my boyfriend.”

Hmmm. Claire had to mull that over for a few seconds, because technically vampires were like ninjas—quiet, sneaky, fast, and deadly. And when they wanted to be, they could be disturbingly invisible. “Would he do it?” she asked. That wasn’t what she wanted to ask, actually; she wanted to